A brand image is considered to be a powerful asset for many organizations. Organizations may allocate significant capital toward protecting their brand image in the form of advertising, market surveys and analysis, quality control measures, trademark protection, and other means. As an organization grows, it may tend to develop an online brand image, sometimes associated with a website or other online application. An online brand image for an organization may be as significant of an asset as a more traditional brand image, such as reputation for quality products.
One facet of an online brand image for an organization is availability or continuity of presence of the online application projecting the brand image. For example, an organization may wish to project such characteristics as strength, reliability, integrity, security, and others through persistent presence of an online application. An organization may desire to provide “always-on” online applications such that a client using the applications receives, or at least perceives, continuous service. Accordingly, much effort has been exerted in the areas of reliability, durability, and security of online applications, particularly with respect to data centers that host such online applications.
As continuity of online applications hosted in a data center may be critical to particular organizations, various efforts have been made to enhance the reliability of data centers. For example, some data centers are provided with physical reliability such as housing the data center in an inconspicuous location, providing restricted access to the data center, providing the data center with environmental isolation and control, and providing electrical power supply redundancy to the data center. Another element of reliability that has been added to data center design is to provide an organization with more than one physical data center, e.g., providing multiple data centers at different locations. Likewise, an online access point, such as an Internet or intranet connection, to a data center may fail, which could obviate certain measures taken to protect the functionality of a single data center.
Providing “redundant” or “backup” data centers may provide an organization with the ability to protect online application functionality against harmful factors that extend beyond the scope of the organization's control over a single data center. For example, a single data center may be vulnerable to physical failure, e.g., from terrorist activity, fire, earthquake, etc. A single data center may be vulnerable to electronic failure, e.g., “hacker” activity such as viruses, broadcast storms, denial of service attacks, and the like. A single data center may be vulnerable to electric and/or telecommunications failure of such a magnitude that the provided redundant systems internal to the data center are unable to mitigate the failure. Other failures reducing or eliminating the functionality of a single data center are possible. In such instances, having additional data centers at separate geographic locations may provide the organization with the ability to maintain data center functionality after the loss of a single data center or online access point.